Remontoire's 'Trident' fighter
Remontoire's "Trident" fightership was a smaller spacecraft developed by the Conjoiner Remontoire, to help combat the threat of Inhibitor swarms. It was built and carried aboard the lighthugger Zodiacal Light, which Remontoire was the commander of by the time the lighthugger reunited with the Resurgam refugees and crew members of fellow lighthugger Nostalgia for Infinity on the planet Ararat. The spacecraft had a hull with an outrigger configuration and was equipped with a miniature version of a Conjoiner drive. It was heavily armed with potent experimental weaponry, wholly specialised to fight the cube-swarms of the Inhibitors and their other offensive devices. This weaponry included the Hypometric Weapon. Description Remontoire’s trident-shaped ship departed from the parking bay in the side of the Zodiacal Light. Almost immediately he felt the spinal compression as the main drive came on, as hard and unforgiving as a fall on to concrete. The hull creaked and protested as the acceleration ramped up through five, six, seven gees. The single outrigger-mounted engine was a microminiature Conjoiner drive, engineered with watchmaker precision, every component squeezed down to neurotic tolerances. It would have made Remontoire nervous, had he permitted himself to feel nervousness. He was the only living thing aboard the recently manufactured ship. Even he seemed something of an afterthought, crammed into a tiny eyelike hollow in the long carbon-black needle of the hull. There were no windows, and only the bare minimum of sensor apertures, but through his implants Remontoire barely perceived the little craft, sensing it only as a glassy extension of his personal space. Beyond the hard boundaries of the ship was a less tangible sphere of sensor coverage: passive and active contacts tickling the part of his brain associated with the proprioceptive knowledge of his own body image. The thrust levelled out at eight gees. There was no inertial protection against that acceleration, even though bulk control of inertia had been within the reach of Conjoiner technology for more than half a century. It couldn’t be allowed. The other technology that the ship carried — the glittering, tinsel-like machinery of the hypometric weapon — was highly intolerant of alterations to the local metric. The hypometric weapons were difficult enough to use in nearly flat, unmolested space-time. But within the influence of inertial technology they became malevolently unpredictable, like spiteful imps. Remontoire would have liked to have accelerated even harder, but above eight gees there was a real danger of shifting the weapon’s tiny components out of alignment. The weapon itself wasn’t much to look at from the outside. Shrouded in a cigar-shaped nacelle flung out as an extension from the same outrigger that held the drive, there was no muzzle, no exhaust, no surface detailing of any kind. The only design constraint had been to arrange for the weapon to be as far from the human occupant as possible. It was, Remontoire thought, a measure of the device’s threatening glamour that he actually felt safer with the dangerous, unstable miniature Con-joiner drive between him and the quixotic weapon. - excerpt from chapter 22 of Absolution Gap Absolution Gap (2003), chapter 22 Appearances * Inhibitor trilogy **''Absolution Gap'' (2003) Notes * The name of this ship type is, of course, somewhat conjectural, as the vessel is only described as a trident-shaped, heavily armed, smaller warship. "Fighter" is a figurative description, as there don't seem to be any space fighters in the conventional sense in the Revelation Space universe, aside from armed shuttles. As the "Trident" ship is a one-seater and entirely specialised for combat, it's the closest equivalent to a purpose-built, albeit large fightercraft. It is uknown if Remontoire's ship bears any name or moniker of its own. References See also Category:Ships Category:Shuttles and small craft